Chet Herbert

Camshaft and drag racing innovator let nothing slow him down

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

Ironically, polio may have actually saved Chet Herbert's life.
Born in March 1928 in Glenbar, Arizona, Herbert was raised in Los Angeles, where he quickly discovered the thrill of going fast. Though his parents preferred that he not risk his neck--they even bought him a trumpet for Christmas one year to quell his need for speed--Herbert instead looked up to his uncle, a mechanic, and soon traded the trumpet for a Cushman scooter.
From the Cushman, he graduated to a Harley-Davidson, terrorizing not only the streets of Los Angeles, but also his mother, who felt sure that Herbert would eventually kill or severely injure himself with his reckless ways.
Instead, polio threatened to do the same in a much less violent way when it attacked Herbert in 1948, seven years before Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine. Herbert emerged from a six-month stint in an iron lung alive, but paralyzed from the chest down and thus confined to a wheelchair. He'd never again ride a motorcycle.
Most people, faced with such a situation, would give up on racing entirely and let the disability dictate the rest of their lives. They'd go count beans or something. For Herbert, however, his months in the iron lung were simply time he spent developing ideas for racing parts and other ways to go fast; he'd just need a hired shoe to drop the hammer in his stead.
Herbert thus returned to motorcycles and stripped a Harley-Davidson down to just the essentials. He took it to the Santa Ana drags in 1950, where the unattractive bike, nicknamed The Beast, recorded runs of 121 MPH, then 129 MPH, beating every other bike, as well as every four-wheeled drag machine at Santa Ana.
Helping Herbert's Beast become so dominant were the roller lifters in its V-twin, a feature of Harley engines since 1929. Herbert tasked himself with applying the technology to a Chevrolet six-cylinder that he was building for a circle-track racer. No established camshaft grinders in Southern California knew how to grind a roller cam, however, so Herbert went down to his local Sears, bought a lathe, and converted it into a camshaft grinder. After some tuning, Herbert had the Chevrolet engine putting out 275hp--more than the Offenhauser engines the circle-track competition was running.
Thus Herbert established Chet Herbert Cams and cornered the market on roller camshafts for American competition engines for the next decade or so. As that business grew, aided by extensive national advertising, Herbert continued to develop his roller camshafts by placing engines so equipped in a succession of Bonneville-bound streamliners also named Beast.
Later on in the 1950s, Herbert returned to drag racing, this time focused on dragsters. He tried a variety of multiple-engine configurations, pioneering the twin inline V-8 format in 1962. He's also credited with developing the "zoomie" header, designed specifically to spew exhaust gases toward the rear tires to blow debris away and improve traction, helping dragsters break the 200 MPH barrier.
Perhaps a more significant contribution to drag racing came when Herbert arranged and funded his sister Doris's purchase of Drag News in 1959. The newspaper had already been around for four years and had become known as the only source for drag racing news outside of the NHRA, but under Doris's tenure as the paper's editor, it grew to become so prominent and respected, it was often referred to as "the drag racer's bible."
Eventually, Herbert's son, Doug, started racing too, first in boats, and then in dragsters. After working briefly with his father in the mid- to late- 1980s, Doug moved to North Carolina and opened his own speed shop, Doug Herbert Performance Parts, still going strong today.
Chet Herbert, inducted to the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame alongside Doris in 1993, remained active in racing, engine building and camshaft engineering through the 1990s and 2000s. In recent years, he even started work with Doug on a new streamliner with the purpose of breaking the wheel-driven land-speed record. Chet, however, became ill with pneumonia and died in April 2009 at the age of 81.
"Despite the fact that he had polio and was in a wheelchair for much of his life, he never let that stop him from doing anything," Doug said. "He proved to everyone that he could accomplish whatever he set his mind to, which taught me that, no matter how tough something may seem, if you fight hard enough, you can overcome it."
Doug has taken that to heart. He now plans on having the streamliner ready for Bonneville later this year.

This article originally appeared in the January, 2011 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.